THINGS CAN BE KNOWN BECAUSE THEY ARE CREATED
The basic principle in St. Thomas’s doctrine of the truth of things can be found in the Quaestiones Disputatae de It is as follows. naturalis inter duos intellectus constituta a natural thing is placed between two knowing subjects,” namely, as he explains, between the intellectus divinus and the intellectus between the Divine and the human minds.
In this “localization” of existing things between the absolutely creative knowledge of God and the non-creative, reality-conformed knowledge of man is found the structure of all reality as a system in which the archetypes and the copies are both embraced. St. Thomas here introduces, in a sense, the old and presumably Pythagorean concept of “measure,” the as something on the one hand given and on the other received. The creative knowledge of God gives measure but receives none non Natural reality is at once measured and itself measuring et But human knowledge is measured and does not give measure non at least it is not what gives measure with respect to natural things, though it does so with regard to res artificial things. (This is the point at which for St. Thomas the distinction between created and artificially constructed things comes into bearing.)
Corresponding with this double reference in things—this is the further development of St. Thomas’s ideas—there must be a double concept of the “truth of things.” The first denotes the creative fashioning of things by God; the second their intrinsic knowability for the human mind. The expression “things are true” means in the first place that they are creatively thought by God; in the second, that they can be approached and grasped in human knowledge. Between these two concepts of truth there exists a relation of prioritas an ontological precedence.
This precedence has a twofold significance. In the first place, we cannot seize the core of this notion: the “truth of things”; in fact, we miss it entirely unless we make it explicit that these things are that they have been brought into being by the creative knowledge of God, and that they proceed from the very “eye of God” (as the ancient Egyptian ontology expressed this same idea).
There is, however, a second meaning to this priority: it is the creative fashioning of things by God which makes it possible for them to be known by men. These two references are therefore connected with one another, not, as it were, like an older and younger brother, but like father and son. The former brings forth the latter. What does this signify? It signifies that things can be known by us because God has creatively thought them; as creatively thought by God, things have not only their own nature (“for themselves alone”); but as creatively thought by God, things have also a reality “for us.” Things have their intelligibility, their inner clarity and lucidity, and the power to reveal themselves, because God has creatively thought them. This is why they are essentially intelligible. Their brightness and radiance is infused into things from the creative mind of God, together with their essential being (or rather, as the very essence of that being!). It is this radiance, and this alone, that makes existing things perceptible to human knowledge. In a scripture St. Thomas remarks: “The measure of the reality of a thing is the measure of its light.” In a late work, the commentary on the Liber de there is a fundamental sentence that formulates this same idea in an almost mystical phrase: actualitas rei est quoddam lumen the reality of things is itself their light,” the reality of things understood as created being! It is this light that makes things perceptible to our eyes. To put it succinctly, things are knowable because they have been created.
At this point something analogous to Sartre’s objection against the treatment of the nature of things in eighteenth-century may be said about the foundation of knowledge. Do not think that it is possible to do both, to argue away the idea that things have been creatively thought by God and then go on to understand how things can be known by the human mind!